1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer systems and computer mass storage devices and subsystems. More particularly, this invention relates to a system and method for automatically determining the physical location and operational status of components in a computer system, and mapping, monitoring, and controlling the same through a graphical user interface.
2. Description of Related Art
Computing systems employing mass storage devices conventionally have various components contained in numerous multi-shelf cabinets in a computer room. These various components contained in the cabinets can include disk drives, controllers, power supplies, blower fans, monitoring modules, backplanes, etc., and are referred to generally as Field Replaceable Units (FRUs).
In managing the computing system, system administrators or other users often have a need for identifying a particular component present in the system, as well as the location and status of the component within the cabinets of the computing system. For instance, if a particular component is malfunctioning, it is desirable for the system administrator to have the ability to quickly and accurately determine the status of the component and locate the component within the computing system. It is also desirable to have this information available to a computer monitoring utility or graphical user interface (GUI).
In the past, components in a computing system have been identified by manually entering the component information into the system monitoring utility or GUI. The system monitoring utility or GUI is manually told what the system components are, how the components are configured into subsystems, and how the subsystems are configured into a full system. For example, the system administrator or some other person manually enters information about the cabinets (i.e., the number of shelves, shelf type, etc.) as well as the physical location of a given component within a cabinet.
This manual entry process is susceptible to human error, and can be very time consuming for large systems consisting of many components. Furthermore, when a component fails in a typical conventional system, the user or system manager or field service personnel must identify and manually search for the failed system component.